More about splash screens

Here’s what I found, that freaked me out, when discussing iPhone apps with web publications.

Yes, they always wanted a splash screen instead of the standard screenshot of the interface. That’s not great, but I understood, and we made it possible in TapLynx.

But that’s not all they wanted — they wanted an animated splash screen, and they’d tell me which apps they’d seen that have that.

Here’s the thing: there’s no way to do an animated splash screen unless you delay the appearance of the app UI. While the app is being launched, the system displays a PNG file provided with the app. It can’t be animated.

But you can animate once the app is actually loaded. What people asked for is that we then display an animated splash screen, and delay the appearance of the user interface.

I didn’t do it.

(To be fair, I would have done it for ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Oh, totally. But publications don’t have that kind of money.)